Homeless at the age of 46, Martin "boosts" goods from New
York City department stores, resells them for money to purchase
a week or two at a cheap hotel, then steals again when the
money runs out. This way of life often lands him in court, where
he faces the standard sentences of sixty or ninety days in jail.
Some judges, however, consider that a waste: Cells cost money,
and Martin isn't that dangerous. They would rather use the
leverage his conviction has given them to get some honest work
out of him, and the city's Community Service Sentencing Project
gives them a reliable way to do so.

That suits Martin just fine. "Jail is overcrowded," he complains.
And you have a lot of gangs going on in jail now....
People get stabbed up, killed." But many other New Yorkers
also see the benefit of his alternative sentencing: He has cleared
lots for communal gardens, cleaned up a YMCA, painted low-income
housing units, and performed other sundry tasks for
neighborhood groups around the city. As he and hundreds of
other petty criminals do such jobs under supervision of the
courts, they demonstrate both the possibilities for saving on jail
costs and constructive use of work as a sanction.

Courts have ordered convicts to work in communities for hundreds
of years; under ancient legal systems based on restitution,
criminals labored to compensate their particular victims for
injury or loss. The Romans used criminals as laborers for public
works, like road construction, or as galley slaves. In the seventeenth
century, offenders in England could be impressed into the
navy or indentured to settlers heading out to the colonies.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
bans slavery and involuntary servitude but exempts work "as
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted." For most of United States history, however, courts
made little use of forced labor as a criminal sentence.

The modern era of community service sentencing began in
1966 in Alameda County, California. Judges there began imposing
work assignments as an alternative to jail for indigent offenders
who could not pay traffic fines. Eventually they extended use
of the sanction to other low-level convicts as well.

The practice spread across the country in the late 1970s, as
the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA)
pumped out funding to encourage it. Sentencing offenders
to unpaid labor inspired some judges' creativity as they combined
community service with jail or a fine or both. Offenders
did low-level maintenance work for public agencies--clearing
litter from playgrounds, sweeping up around public buildings or
housing projects, cutting grass and raking leaves in parks, washing
cars in an agency motor pool. Others did clerical work or
answered phones. Thousands more were sent off to help out
at hospitals, nursing homes, social service centers, and other
nonprofit organizations.

There were fewer problems with unions than some predicted.
Offenders in community service were doing jobs no one else would
do, or jobs for which no funds were in place, so they posed no
threat to union workers.

Many of these programs withered in the 1980s after the LEAA well
dried up. But the concept was established. Judges appreciated the
new option--more punitive than traditional probation, less punitive
and more productive than incarceration. Community service
sentencing provided free labor for public works or nonprofit groups,
held offenders accountable for the damage they caused, and
perhaps even left them with some new job or life skills to help keep
them out of further trouble.

Where no special agencies existed to keep track of people
sentenced to community service, probation departments took over.
But with no federal program in place to monitor the practice or set
standards, wide disparity characterized the imposition of community
service sentences and raised troubling questions about its fairness.
Debates continued over whether judges gave white middle-class
offenders community service sentences for crimes that routinely
landed the poor black or Hispanic criminal
in prison.

Scholars like Norval Morris and Michael Tonry, in Between
Prison and Probation (1990), could theorize about the capacity of
community service to afford precision--a judge might measure a
sentence to fit the seriousness of a crime in increments of days or
even hours. Yet perceptions of how to do so varied widely from
place to place as judges, program executives, and criminal-justice
bureaucrats debated how punishment for crime ought to equate with
work. In New Jersey a recidivist drunk driver might get 90 days of
community service; in California the same crime drew only 90 hours.

Larger urban states continued to make extensive use of
community service sentencing through the 1980s and 1990s. "Judges
like it; it's relatively cheap," observes Alan Harland, a
professor of criminology at Temple University who has studied
community service sentencing nationwide. In recent years state
legislatures have even mandated community service as part of the
sentence for certain offenses. "It's seen as punitive and
rehabilitative at the same time," says Sandy Seely, former head of
the National Community Sentencing Association.

Thus in New Jersey, on any given day, some 40,000 people are
under an order of community service. In Harris County, Texas,
which surrounds Houston, 5,500 defendants perform community
service each month. In the populous counties surrounding Los
Angeles and San Francisco, California, judges impose the sentence
on thousands of offenders per week. And even in a more rural state
like North Carolina, more than 20,000 offenders are performing
sentences of community service at any one time.

Judges typically impose the sentences according to formula--for
example, six hours of work equal one day of jail. The offenders are
interviewed to determine their skills and availability, then matched
with jobs at government or nonprofit agencies. The probation
department handles enforcement and eventual referral of failed
cases hack to the court for resentencing.

Rates of completion vary from place to place, depending on how
well the programs are managed and how effectively probation
departments or other law enforcement agents actually go after
absentees. In New Jersey, Bill Burrell, the state's chief of Adult
Probation Services and Community Service, claims a completion rate
of 85 percent for his large community service work force, while in
Indiana the programs run by Prisoners and Community Together
(PACT) show completion rates of about 80 percent. PACT assigns
caseworkers to work full time on supervision of offenders, visiting
the work sites and documenting their progress. In other places,
however, supervision and follow-up are much more haphazard; all
too often a court learns that offenders failed to complete community
service orders only when they are arrested for new crimes.

It is hard to determine how much community service serves as
a substitute for jail or prison. The argument for the sanction
looks compelling: Sentencing a person to community service
spares the huge expense of incarceration. Yet during the 1970s
and early 1980s, researchers seeking out genuine cases of convicts
doing community service instead of time behind bars came
up relatively empty handed.

In a 1982 article for Corrections Magazine, Kevin Krajick
found a few places where community service appeared to have
prevented incarceration of juveniles and only two that credibly
did so for adults. These were the Community Service Sentencing
Project started in New York City by the Vera Institute of Justice
and the Indiana-based Prisoners and Community Together program.
PACT, Krajick reported, set a policy of accepting only
convicted felons or misdemeanants who had pleaded down from
felony charges. Program officials estimated that without the
community service option, about half of the offenders in the program
would have gone to jail or prison.

There is some reason to believe that use of the sanction as a
genuine alternative increased in subsequent years. As courts continued
to feel the pressures of jail crowding, the advantages of
community service appeared more obvious than ever, and judges
sought ways to make the most of it. As the federal government
brought pressure for tougher laws against drunk driving, for
example, community service became the sentence of choice,
especially for offenders with stable jobs and families. Seely says
that today, even drunk drivers found guilty of vehicular homicide
may wind up working off their debt to society at a community
service site rather then doing time behind bars. "It's a sentence
that the victim's family usually agrees to, she says.

In addition, states that impose escalating sanctions--intensive
probation supervision, electronic monitoring, day treatment,
restitution--that substitute for jail may include community service
as part of a sentence package. And a few jurisdictions have
set up programs that substitute community service for jail but
call it something else.

California, for example, runs a sizable "work release" program
for people who otherwise would be serving jail terms of a few days
or a week. Offenders sentenced to the custody of the county sheriff
may qualify if they have roots in the community, family ties,
and a nonviolent record. Elsewhere work release means allowing
inmates to work at paying jobs on the outside as they approach
the end of jail or prison confinement. But California's work release
offenders never see the inside of a county jail. Instead they report
for work cleaning beaches and parks, painting public buildings, or
doing other work under constant supervision of a deputy sheriff.
In most places that would he called a community service sentence.

New York's Community Service Sentencing Project (CSSP),
funded by contracts with New York City and New York State,
manages a caseload of 50 to 60 offenders on any given day, for a
total of 1,800 per year. It began operations in 1979 as an experiment
of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit group known
for its innovations and research on urban problems, but now
operates as part of a freestanding agency.

The CSSP's long record of sound management gives it formidable
credibility with the courts and a good reputation with
politicians and the news media. CSSP offenders perform some
90,000 hours of community work per year; recidivism rates are
no higher than for offenders sent to jail. More than 70 percent of
offenders sentenced to CSSP successfully complete their work
assignments. About 75 percent of those who fail, go back before
the courts; overall nearly 90 percent of offenders sentenced to
the program either do the work or go to jail.

That level of completion satisfies the courts. "It's regarded highly
by the judges, says Justice Charles Solomon, supervising judge
of the Manhattan Criminal Court. It's more meaningful to have
someone do two weeks of real work than to sit in a jail cell for two
weeks." He reiterates that the program has "a lot of credibility. If
someone doesn't do it, we'll know. We'll see them back again."

By now the CSSP's representatives are familiar figures in city
courtrooms. Their job is to screen defendants as they come into
court and participate in plea negotiations with prosecutors and
defense attorneys. Defendants with violent records are eliminated,
as are those with more than 50 prior arrests. But so are those
with no priors at all, on the assumption that they would not be
sentenced to jail in any event. The defendants also must submit
to an interview with court representatives who insist that they
have a verifiable home address and otherwise tell the truth.

Those who survive the grilling gain a strong advocate. The
court representative goes before the judge and prosecutor to
argue for community service, emphasizing the offender's ties to
the community, the need to hold down jail crowding, and the
benefits a neighborhood will reap from the offender's work.

Once sentenced, the offenders are told to report to CSSP locations
in the basements of housing projects. The work day starts
with coffee and doughnuts, followed by a hit of leaf raking, snow
removal, or trash pickup to compensate the project for use of its
space. The supervisors take attendance and dispatch members of
the CSSP enforcement team--set up in the late 1980s to shore up
completion rates--to go after the no-shows. The enforcers make
two or three attempts to find recalcitrants or roust them out of
bed. After that they go to court for arrest warrants.

Meanwhile vans take the rest of the group to the day's main
work sites. Unlike many other community service programs,
CSSP offenders work only for small non-profit organizations.
A typical day might find them digging soil and hauling gravel
to prepare a community garden, clearing construction debris
at a parochial school, or painting the halls of a nursing home.
From the beginning the project rejected work for city and state
agencies. There were potential conflicts with civil service unions
and the work requirements were less flexible.

"With the nonprofits, we can call up and say we have a crew
ready to come over now," explains Joel Copperman, the program's
executive director. "Try saying that to a government
agency." Besides, he adds, work for the neighborhood groups
"seems to be the most valued. It's been our way of giving back to
the community in the most direct way."

Developing the worksites became a full time job for Clayton
Williams, an ex-convict who found employment at Vera and
became a member of the staff that first implemented CSSP.
He roamed the neighborhoods of New York City looking for
promising patches of urban decay: a vacant lot in need of greening,
a dilapidated building intended to house the homeless mentally
ill, a parochial school's leaf-strewn play yard.

His efforts and the work of the CSSP offenders don't go unappreciated.
"They come out and do everything," says Idonia
Johnson, a neighborhood leader who called on CSSP when she
and her neighbors needed help with heavy digging to turn an
empty lot into a garden. "Planting, cleaning, doing the beds.
They're very nice to work with. We never had any problem with
them." (Indeed, for a time Ms. Johnson felt so grateful that she
prepared sumptuous chicken dishes to bring over for lunch,
causing some competition among the offenders for assignment
to her site.)

The crews work under the constant supervision of CSSP staff
membersrecruited for their street smarts and their ability to handle
occasional arguments, bouts of recalcitrance, or pleas for
time off to take care of urgent business. A standard response to
the person with a problem at the welfare office or a sick relative:
How would you handle it if you were in jail? At the beginning
and at the end of the shift, however, offenders have a chance
to meet with caseworkers who assess needs and try to solve
problems that might get in the way of reporting for work.
An offender who shows up on a cold day without warm clothes
may get boots and a coat. Homeless offenders get money for
flophouse rooms; some also get help with food, child care, and
referrals for medical care or substance abuse treatment.

Despite the occasional hassles offenders are unanimous in
saying they'd much rather be working for the program than
doing time in a city jail. Some say the community service sentence,
modest an interruption as it might be in the context of
their whole lives, has some rehabilitative effect. CSSP is "showing
me how to be a more responsible person, as far as getting up
on time for work and what have you," says Jerry. "I know that
there's an eight month sentence hanging over my head [should
he fail to complete the 70 hours], so I get up."

The only substantive complaint offenders voice arises from
their disappointment at the loss of help with food, clothes, and
housing expenses after they complete their community service
obligation. They also lament that after the program gives them a
healthy taste of honest work, they have to give it up.

"When it's over with, you're on your own again, Martin
says. "You're back to day one again. You leave. Where do you
go?" He believes the program ought to offer services "that can
gear you to staying out here, so you don't have to do those things
you do" to survive on the streets.

Richard, serving his third community service sentence, concurs.
"I think this would be a better program if it was geared
more towards setting people up with actual jobs ... you leave
here and what are you going to do? You go back and do the same
things you did before to get money."

CSSP managers express some skepticism that the motivation
to work would continue for many of the offenders if a work-placement
component were added. For now, in any case, says
Copperman, "It's not what we do. We're not an employment
program. We're punishment."

In the beginning, New York City officials and Vera's planners
saw the Community Service Sentencing Project as a way both to
ease pressure on crowded jails and to establish a tougher sanction
for low-level offenders who got off with light probation
supervision or had charges dismissed. Funders and corrections
policy experts objected that community service sentences for the
second group would "widen the net" of social control. But in a
memo on the subject a Vera executive held out for their inclusion,
arguing that "the net of social control is presently inadequate."
In the end they agreed to divide the caseload half and
half between those bound for jail and those likely to receive fines
or simple probation. A second decision concerned sentence
length. All offenders sentenced to community service, the Vera
planners decided, would do the same seventy hours of work.
This denied judges the chance to fine-tune sentences to fit crimes,
one of the basic theoretical selling points of community service.
But Vera officials were determined that sentences would be completed,
and they worried that they might not be able to coax or
compel people to work for more than two weeks.

Similar pragmatism guided a third decision: to offer community
service only as punishment, with no broader claims of rehabilitation.
If they bought that idea, courts and the public would
more easily accept the sanction as a substitute for jail. Besides, it
seemed disingenuous to describe forced, menial, unpaid labor
any other way.

In another choice with long-term implications, the Vera managers
also decided to administer community service from a freestanding
agency rather than turning it over to the probation
department, as was widely done elsewhere. The separate agency,
they hoped, would preserve the identity of community service as
a punishment in its own right and as a real substitute for jail.

The program's managers still like to tell the story of its first
client, a young man named Willie, who provided an immediate
test of the planner's assumptions. Convicted of stealing a $20
pair of trousers from a department store, Willie had seemed like
a sound candidate. But he failed to show up for his first day of
work. The staff panicked: After all the careful preparation,
would the project fail with its first case?

Willie had given a number of addresses and could not be
found at any of them. But his screening papers also noted that he
was enrolled in a methadone maintenance program. Clayton
Williams, then a work supervisor, looked it up and went over the
next morning. "They may not go to school, they may not go to
work, they may not even go home," he remembers thinking,
"but they're going to this methadone program" because the
alternative was the illness of withdrawal. Williams explained
who he was, and the benefits of the new program, to all who
would listen at the clinic. When Willie finally walked in at the
end of the day, Williams recalls, "Everybody jumped on him, the
director, ... the case managers, his friends"--all berating him
for not taking advantage of the community service sentence.

Willie reported faithfully to work for the next two weeks, and
community service sentencing was finally up and running.

That year Bronx judges sent 5 to 7 offenders per month to the
project. Most completed the sentence without problems. The
following year the numbers increased. By the end of 1980 more
than 300 offenders had participated, and Vera moved to expand
the program with offices in other boroughs of the city.

Though the level of acceptance continued to increase, program
administrators found themselves fighting hard at a couple
of points during the 1980s to sustain its credibility. The first
challenge concerned the number of jail-bound cases. An analysis
of cases between October 1, 1981, and September 30, 1982,
showed that citywide about 45 percent of convicts doing community
service would otherwise have gone to jail-close to the
fifty-fifty split planners had set as a goal. But there were big differences
among the boroughs. The figure for Manhattan was
more than 60 percent, while the figure for Brooklyn was an
unacceptable 28 percent and the figure for the Bronx was an
even lower 20 percent.

In 1983 a new director, Judy Greene, took over the program
determined to increase the Brooklyn and Bronx figures for jailbound
offenders. Percentages were low in those boroughs, she
found, because prosecutors had gained too much influence over
selection of cases for the project. She required that cases be taken
from court dockets rather than prosecutors' files, and she denied
prosecutors the chance to veto selected candidates. These
changes quickly increased the percentages of jail diversions to 52
percent in the Bronx and 57 percent in Brooklyn.

Problems with enforcement caused another crisis a few years
later. From Clayton Williams's first-day pursuit of Willie, Vera
had been determined to make the offenders do the work; especially
given the relatively short seventy-hour sentence, the program's
managers believed a high rate of completion was essential
to preserving the court's belief in community service as a viable
substitute for jail.

If supervisors weren't able to locate absent offenders and persuade
them to return to work, they sent warning letters, then
notified either the prosecutor or the judge of the default. The
court would issue summonses, followed by arrest warrants for
those who failed to appear. Judges were stern with absconders,
giving jail terms of six months or more to replace the two weeks
of community service.

This process produced impressive success rates in the early
years; Douglas McDonald, who examined the program in Punishment
Without Walls (1986), reports that through June 1983,
86 percent of the Bronx offenders had completed their sentences.
For Brooklyn and Manhattan, the figures were 85 percent
and 89 percent.

By 1986, however, the spread of crack and other intensifying
social problems stressed the community service program along
with the rest of criminal justice. The completion rate plummeted.
The project's managers tried to respond by sending out new
"compliance agents" to find and confront the no-shows and by
hiring "participant monitors" to help individual offenders with
the problems that were preventing them from getting to work.
But the social work approach wasn't enough to stem the absenteeism.
Returning cases to the courts, meanwhile, had little
immediate effect, since the city police units responsible for
enforcing arrest warrants had become overwhelmed. An offender
would face consequences for failure to complete community service
only if the fact came to light after an arrest for a new offense.

By 1987 the completion rate had slumped to 50 percent, and
the program faced a potentially disastrous erosion of credibility.
Another new director, Susan Powers, decided on a drastic
response: She set up her own armed enforcement unit to go after
truants so that she would not have to rely on city police. This
was possible under a law authorizing the designation of "special
patrolmen" for such a purpose but required several months of
negotiation with the police department. In the end the department
gave its blessing, and Powers fielded a team recruited from
the ranks of retired police officers. The plan worked. The new
unit halted the slide in completions; within a few years the rate
had climbed back to a healthier 70 percent.

If strong management has kept the program on track, however,
it cannot provide answers to more fundamental questions.
One concerns public safety. Offenders sentenced to CSSP are
under supervision of the program for only ten days when they
might have served jail sentences of one or two months. Because
many are chronic recidivists who would have been incapacitated
longer in jail, additional crime may well be another cost of community
service. In his study of the Vera project, McDonald calculated
the rate of additional offenses at fifteen arrests per 100
people sentenced to the program.

Copperman responds that the point is now "all so speculative,"
since it is based on ten-year-old research that has not been
updated. CSSP graduates have yet to generate scandalous headlines
with horrible crimes that might have been prevented had
they gone to jail. And Justice Solomon considers it an issue of
slight concern. He emphasizes that offenders sentenced to community
service are screened to eliminate any with histories of
violence. There might be a small risk of more nonviolent crimes,
but to the extent community service manages to keep people out
of jail, it makes possible the incarceration of more dangerous
criminals. "That's the philosophy," he asserts. CSSP "is really
designed to free up jail space for more violent offenders."

The problem might be remedied, of course, by abandoning the
uniform seventy-hour sentence and requiring community service
for periods that approximate possible jail terms. But Copperman
hesitates to embrace the idea. Longer sentences would require
more staff the program can't afford. And there is no certainty the
success rate could be sustained even with more staff. "If you're
going to create a program with enormous failure rates, then
you're never going to get anywhere," Copperman argues.

Another difficult question concerns costs. What is the dollar
value of cells the program saves or frees for use by more violent
offenders? CSSP operates on an annual budget of $2.9 million in
funding from New York City and New York State. By the most
optimistic estimates, the 1800 clients sentenced to the program
for two-week terms would otherwise occupy the equivalent of
250 jail beds per year. Since the annual cost of one bed is
$58,400, it's tempting to claim a saving in jail costs of $14.6 million
per year, for a net saving to taxpayers of $11.7 million.

Yet it's misleading to calculate the total saving that way, since
those 250 beds remain so tiny a fraction of the city jail system's
20,000 bed capacity. As McDonald points out, no cellblocks are
closed down, no guards are laid off for the sake of so small a
reduction in bed use. The real saving amounts only to the marginal
cost of a prisoner's daily care--food, toiletries and the like--certainly
no more than, by generous estimate, $20 per bed per
day, or $7,300 per year. On that basis the saving totals only $1.8
million for the 250 beds, and community service sentencing, with
a total operating expense of $2.9 million, actually costs the
taxpayers $1.1 million per year. The program also generates the
value of the work done for the nonprofit groups--about
$450,000 a year if one values the 90,000 hours at $5 per hour.
But none of that affects the city budget.

Copperman doesn't contest the point. "We recognize," he
says, "that if we can't save 750 bed years [enough to begin
making some jail staff and plant reductions possible] then
we're probably not saving anything, because the fixed costs
are enormous."

Even so, the fact that the city has not chosen to take full
advantage of it hardly negates the program's potential. New
York's experience still demonstrates that given tough,
thoughtful management, community service can ease pressure
on jails while making offenders accountable for crimes in a
way the public will support.